first impressions of #Racket seem pretty good! it has some stuff that I don’t like from other Lisps like:
- a weird pseudo-module system instead of a proper module system
- an unnecessarily large number of ways to compare values
- several forms that implicitly add new functions to the namespace
it’s also a very very complex language compared to Janet or Fennel. but the things that I really like about it are:
- the Racket folks clearly care deeply about people’s first time experience with the language and have made it incredibly smooth and easy in many different ways (they even have a nice, friendly little IDE called DrRacket that comes with every Racket installation)
- it has easy, out-of-the-box Windows support! (this is pretty rare with Lisps)
- the documentation is fantastic. it’s not just incredibly thorough and well-explained, it’s also split into {documentation for beginners} and {full and complete documentation for masochists} sections, and everything is heavily linked together with hyperlinks to more documentation that explains things even further
my overall first impression of Racket is that it’s the Python of Lisps: it’s very complex and full-featured, but it also cares deeply about being as easy and friendly for beginners as possible, and I think that’s one of the most important traits for a language to have